GEN Z: WE KEEP IT UNREAL
Turning to plastic surgery in their 20s
Life’s fantastic when you’re plastic. As celebrities scramble for doses of weight-loss aid Ozempic, Gen Z is booking cosmetic procedures more now than ever. In fact, 75% of plastic surgeons saw a spike in clients under 30, according to data released last week by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, which is a “consistently higher plateau over the five previous years.”
Board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Ashley Amalfi said she’s seen an uptick in young clientele at the Quatela Center for Plastic Surgery in Rochester, NY — and now, about one-third of her patients are Gen Z.
“I really see that as sort of this extension of the beauty market,” Amalfi told The Post, calling the trend “great.”
“They are a population in general who’s just taking really good care of themselves,” she said.
The most common requests at Amalfi’s office from 20-somethings are breast lifts, breast augmentations and Botox injections, which she said is merely preventative.
“They’re taking the time and investing in themselves and doing these sorts of things at a younger age,” she explained.
While the popularity of boob jobs has never really waned, Amalfi said women are booking the procedure at a much younger age.
Content creator Jazmyn Smith, 26, revealed to her 229,000 TikTok followers that she is getting breast augmentation this week.
“Get ready with me to get fake boobs,” she declared in a video viewed over 112,000 times. “Say goodbye to these little itty bitty t-ties, bitches,” she shared in another clip posted Sunday evening.
Smith, who has already had rhinoplasty and Botox, told The Post that some of her followers tried to dissuade her from going under the knife, but she’s steadfast in her decision.
“I want to live life with my boobs,” she said, adding that people who are “older” try to talk her out of her choice. “Now’s a better time to do it instead of like when I’m 30; I want to do it in my 20s,” she said.
The Manhattan-based TikToker
argued that the only problem with plastic surgery is if “you try to hide it.”
“I think it was more of a touchy subject years ago than it is now,” Smith said.
Gen Z is known for being open and honest online, so Smith is not alone in being transparent about her cosmetic surgery procedures.
Alix Earle, the 22-year-old certified It girl taking over TikTok with bleached tresses and a surgically sculpted chest, recently celebrated her one-year “boob-iversary.” Another popular content creator, 25-year-old Audrey Peters, documented her entire journey before and after getting chin liposuction online.
“I’m not saying I started the trend,” Peters told The Post at the time. “But I will say after I got it, I saw a lot of people do it.”
Perhaps the surge in surgery procedures can be attributed to time spent online: A report from December 2022 claimed that over half of Gen Z typically spends four or more hours scrolling on social media, with TikTok named one of the most-used social media apps.
But the time spent plugged in comes at a cost, especially to those who regularly create content. TikToker Eli Rallo, 24, tells The Post that being chronically online made her more self-conscious, as cruel viewers scrutinized her insecurities — namely, her “gummy smile.”
“I started doing TikTok, and people just started being so f-king mean to me about my smile, to the point where I stopped smiling in pictures altogether,” the New Yorker, who has over 655,000 followers, admitted. “I decided to get the lip flip, because I couldn’t deal with it anymore.”
The “lip flip” procedure involves injecting a smidge of Botox into the muscles of the upper lip to keep it in place when smiling. For Rallo, who has also undergone breast reductions, the simple change allowed her to “feel pretty again.”
“When I looked at myself in the mirror, I just saw the hate comments telling me my smiles were horrible,” added the author and influencer.
Peters told The Post last year that the internet is so “f--king brutal” that she paid to remove her “double chin” with a procedure called air sculpting.
“The reason I did it is partially because it was something I was always insecure about and I always wanted to fix,” Peters said. “It was something that always bothered me, I hate the way they looked in photos with or without my job being on camera.”
Rallo also regularly gets Botox injected into her forehead, joking she gets it in the same spot her father has deep-set wrinkles she “could run a credit card” through.
She’s not alone; Amalfi said that this is the most common type of injectables her young clients request, tackling the troublesome lines before they’ve even settled in.
While plastic surgery is typically an afterthought later in life, Amalfi tells Gen Z clientele that cosmetic procedures are “absolutely safe” even at their age and ensures they will “age gracefully.”
“We never really have a magic ball as to how exactly someone is going to age because there’s going to be so many changes in their life,” she said. “The reality is, it’s not causing any harm.”